Survey of interfaces and visualizations of complex networks

19 articles
Tag visualization

Splunk is a general tool for analysing data in huge IT infrastructures. It consists of different tools that can be utilized in different contexts. With the “Splunk App for Enterprise Security” potential threats and security incidents can be observed, analysed and classified. Users of the app are presented with a web dashboard that visualizes different aspects of the network.

Snort is an open source intrusion detection/prevention system (IDS/IPS) developed by Sourcefire. It is the most used IDS/IPS worldwide. Snort alone has no GUI to interact with, but it’s possible to connect several other Network Security Monitoring systems with it, like Snorby, BASE, OSSIM.

ACARM (Alert Correlation, Assessment and Reaction Module) is a tool that correlates alerts sent by host and network sensors into groups and in that way reducing the amount of messages that need to be viewed by a sytem administrator. There is a Web GUI that let’s the admin observe the different kinds of alerts with different graphical representations like, for example, pie charts, bar charts or more advanced. Different kinds of alerts are color coded on a color scale from green to red, green being just information, while red being critical.

The observatory is a Web-App that allows you to view the the economic situation of different countries by applying different visualizations to the data and as the creators state: “a tool that allows users to quickly compose a visual narrative about countries and the products they exchange”. The user has the choice between treemaps, network node diagrams, stacked area charts, maps, for example. The user can get an overview about imports and exports of single countries, either by amount in a treemap or by time in a stacked area chart. In a network node diagram it can be observed how products are connected wioth each other. Also, products can be put into focus by showing the total export of a product and how much of the product different countries exported. The interface is a bit clunky, there is no strict information hierarchy, so sometimes you don’t realize what exactly you’re looking at at first glance.

With a flow diagram the New York Times shows how the votes of the different states in the USA changed from one presidential election to the other. By hovering over single states their flow is highlighted while the other states are grayed out. The x-scale describes how many percent of the votes were gained or lost for a party in one election, so if there was a big change, the lines literally “swing”. The thickness of the lines is proportional to the number of electoral votes one state has.

For the 30th anniversary of the Ars Electronica, Moritz Stefaner designed a 10 x 3 meter big wall that visualizes the archive of the Ars Electronica from different perspectives. One part of the visualization looks at quantitative aspects like how many submissions there were in certain years in different categories. A second part shines light on the connections between jury members and awarded artists and a third part shows the historical context of the awarded projects, where they were published, what the effect of the award was on other areas.

In this project Australian data visualization firm dataviz Australia shows the early stages of an attack on a honeypot VoIP server extension. This animation is based on real data and was created with a Ruby-based tool called gltail. The attack is represented by the circles coming in from the right side meeting the defense of the server in the middle, represented by the circles coming from the left side.

Tableau is a software that provides companies and private users with a simple tool to create basic interactive graphs like maps, bar and line charts, heat maps and other from uploaded data files. There are different versions of the software for different use cases. You can use a desktop version to look at your data or you can create interactive graphics for the web and combine modules to form a dashboard, for example, to keep track of the development of a company’s business.